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Thursday, 12 February 2015

We love birthdays and red cars....

Birthdays are great and we kind of love to celebrate them. It was the second birthday from Pablo yesterday. We all took one day off from our work responsibilities and spend a lovely day together.

The beauty of having your birthday in the middle of the week and having the possibility to take the day off, is that you can spend the day in the city and have a complete different experience as you usually would do. Barcelona in the middle of the working week is magical...you see everything else, but people! You can actually hold still for a second look around and discover so much beautiful things. The walk through the well-known streets feels different, as you are not running as fast as you can through the crowd to make sure you are not losing your partner out of your sign. Your pulse is not beating like crazy, because you are racing with the people around you....everybody is on rush and somehow you feel you need to do the same.

All this is gone, when you visit the city in the middle of the week. And the experience of being almost alone and having the city all to yourself continues...in the cafes, in the shops and even in the Zoo. Usually we would go to the Zoo in the weekends, finding it overcrowded, noisy and with lots of queues. Yesterday however the whole Zoo was just for us alone and we used the possibility to have a relaxed day at the Zoo, with some nice photo shots and a small birthday picknick.

Pablo´s favorite toys these days are cars, cars in every color, size and material. So I decided to make a birthday cake for him in a car shape. He got this one little wooden red car, which I used as a prop to make his cake. It turned out great I think as Pablo could not see any differences between the cake car and the real one, he wanted directly to start playing with this as he saw it. I tried to explain to him that this is a cake to be eaten, but he would not believe me till we cut it open.

As a cake I choose our favorite chocolate cake, which is very moist and chocolaty. It goes very well with a cream cheese frosting and is quite easy to make. For the decoration I used fondant (sugar paste), which is always a good choice if you want to make something special. It is very easy to use, once you know some tricks and can be bought in many stores.

Chocolate cake

2 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

pinch of salt

2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder

1,5 cup of sugar

1 cup vegetable oil

2 eggs

1 cup buttermilk

1 teaspoon of white vinegar

1/2 cup plain hot coffee

Preheat the oven to 180C. In a medium bowl whisk together flour, baking soda, baking powder, cocoa powder and salt. In a large bowl combine sugar and oil. Mix in the eggs and buttermilk, then coffee and white vinegar. Mix with a hand whisk. Combine the wet ingredients with the dry once. Whisk till all combine, do not over beat as it will make you cake dense.
Separate the batter between 2 round cake pans and bake for 30-40 minutes. Let the cake to cool completely and frost as you wish.

Cream cheese frosting

150 g powdered sugar

120 g butter at room temperature

250 g cream cheese

Mix butter and powdered sugar with an electrical mixer, till the mixture will get fluffy and pale in the color. Add cream cheese in 2 parts, continue beating. Add more powdered sugar if the frosting becomes a bit runny.